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Last Tuesday, an event of such magnitude struck the latest round of the climate conference – talks which have been going on in various forms since the early 1990s – that the response of many participants and NGOs is to pretend nothing’s happened and carry on as before. Today is gender and education day at the COP22 in Marrakech. Gender equality and the empowerment of women is written into the preamble of last December’s Paris Agreement, the climate treaty that President Obama ratified without sending to the Senate for its advice and consent. ‘Gender justice is climate justice,’ as one feminist NGO puts it.

There are Feminists for a Fossil Fuel Free Future. You can download a Gender Climate Tracker app for iPhone and Android. ‘Our existing economies are based on gender exploitative relationships,’ one speaker told a side meeting. ‘The first ecology is my body,’ another declared. Sexual and reproductive rights require climate justice. ‘Sixty percent of my body is water. What I’m drinking takes me to my city and to the health of the planet.’

The climate change negotiations are a never-ending process symbolized by the initial adorning every poster and lectern at the conference. Marrakech is the 22nd conference of the parties under the 1992 UN framework convention on climate change – COP 22; the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – CMP 12; and the first session of the conference of the parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement – CMA1.

Far from creating institutional overload, climate change is much more than it might appear to the naïve observer. It is about remoulding society and changing the global economy. It has set in motion a process that accretes constituencies and sucks in government agencies as it extends its scope and strengthens its hold by creating the justification for huge slush funds of climate finance. Marrakech sees parties being urged to raise their ambition from $100bn a year of annual climate funding to $500bn. It creates a momentum that seems unstoppable. As President Obama’s climate envoy, Jonathan Pershing, pointed out today, it was a Republican Congress that extended subsidies for wind and solar. ‘It’s not going to stop in a context of a change of administration,’ Pershing pointedly added.

Well, it might do just that. When in 1982, Al Haig asked Ronald Reagan why he was rejecting the Law of the Sea, Reagan replied: ‘Al, that’s what the last election was all about … It was about not doing things just because that’s the way they’ve been done before.’ The Paris Agreement and the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan which is its domestic counterpart would, if implemented, damage the United States far more than the Law of the Sea ever could have done. But the answer is the same as Reagan’s. Quit the whole damn shebang.

In a recent letter to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Troutman Sanders attorney Peter Glaser argues that “EPA far understated the effects of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) by exaggerating the amount of coal generation that will retire even without the rule.” Ironically, the smoking gun evidence is in the agency’s updated modeling, which now tallies with U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data.

Here’s how the numbers break down.

In EPA’s “base case” for the CPP, the agency assumed that in 2016, almost 20 percent of coal capacity would disappear even if the rule were not adopted, reducing coal generation to 214 gigawatts (GW).

On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals released a 320-page transcript of the marathon oral argument on EPA’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emission standards for existing fossil-fuel power plants, the agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP).

To my knowledge, the transcript is not available on the Court’s Web site. To make the document more easily accessible to the public, I am pleased to post it on GlobalWarming.Org.

To read/download the oral argument, click on the highlighted text in the first paragraph above.

U. S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping will announce that their two countries are officially joining the Paris Climate Treaty when they meet on Saturday, 3rd September, ahead of the G-20 summit meeting in Hangzhou, China. The South China Morning Post reported on 25th August that the announcement would occur on Friday, 2nd September, but an environmental reporter told me today that Saturday was the day.

President Obama’s action in joining the treaty without ratification by the Senate is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority. Article Two, Section Two, Clause Two of the U. S. Constitution states: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”

The U. S. State Department insisted at COP-21 in Paris last December that calling it the Paris Agreement rather than the Paris Climate Treaty would help President Obama evade the constitutional requirement of Senate ratification. Obama Administration officials continue to insist that it is an executive agreement that only requires the President’s approval. Marlo Lewis, my CEI colleague, details why it is a treaty and not merely an executive agreement in this analysis, and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation makes a similar analysis here.

Negotiators at COP-21 went along with the charade that it’s not really a treaty for the United States. However, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat considers it a treaty. The relevant UNFCCC web page is headlined: “Paris Agreement—Status of Ratification.” The information note prepared by the UNFCCC Legal Affairs Programme on the Entry into Force of the Paris Agreement: Legal Requirements and Implications begins: “1. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states that ‘a treaty enters into force in such manner and upon such date as it may provide or as the negotiating States may agree’.”

Moreover, every other country considers it a treaty and is going through its normal procedures for joining a treaty. Patrick Goodenough in CNS News reported recently that even in China, which is ruled by a Communist Party dictatorship, the government has referred the treaty to the Standing Committee of Parliament for its approval.

The fact that President Obama knows that Paris is a treaty inadvertently slipped out just this week. Valerie Richardson reported in the Washington Times that: “Speaking at a conservation summit in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Mr. Obama said elected officials in the U.S. must continue to work on policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after he leaves office in January. ‘It’s not going to happen if we boast about how we’re going to scrap international treaties, or have elected officials who are alone in the world in denying climate change, or put our energy and environmental policies in the hands of big polluters,’ Mr. Obama said.”

It will be a bitter irony if President Obama does indeed unilaterally commit the United States to the Paris Climate Treaty on 3rd September for it was on that day in 1783 that United States negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris officially ending the American Revolutionary War with the United Kingdom. An official U. S. government web page includes this comment: “The three American negotiators, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, proved themselves to be masters of the game, outmaneuvering their counterparts and clinging fiercely to the points of national interest that guaranteed a future for the United States.”

Clinging fiercely to the national interest is not really President Obama’s thing. Another difference between then and now is that the Continental Congress meeting in Annapolis ratified the Treaty of Paris on 14th January 1784.

The South China Morning Post reported on Thursday that U. S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping “are set to jointly announce their ratification” of the Paris Climate Treaty when they meet on 2nd September before the G-20 Summit. This is curious because ratifying treaties in the United States requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

Here is the language from Article Two, Section Two, Clause Two of the U. S. Constitution: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”

The article by Li Jing references this curious requirement: “There are still some uncertainties from the US side due to the complicated US system in ratifying such a treaty, but the announcement is still quite likely to be ready by Sept 2,” said a source, who declined to be named.

In China’s Communist Party dictatorship, ratification merely requires their Maximum Leader to say, “So be it.”

Later in the article, Li Jing again tries to explain the inscrutable U. S. methods for ratifying a treaty: “US law allows the nation to join international agreements in a number of ways, including through the authority of the president.”

Lo and behold, the President of the United States can ratify a treaty in the same way as China’s Maximum Leader. He merely has to say the magic words, “So be it.” And it is so. Who knew that President Barack Obama has become our Maximum Leader, or perhaps I should say our dear Maximum Leader?

Among other evidence, we will cite regulatory comments that no longer exist on agency Web sites. To ensure those sources have active links, I post several below. But first some background. [click to continue…]

Researchers from Canada, the United States, and India measured the indoor air quality impacts of providing modern “clean cook stoves” to families in southern India. The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) subsidizes the distribution of such devices.

The effectiveness (or lack thereof) of CDM-supported cook stoves to reduce indoor air pollution is a big deal. As the researchers explain:

The researchers examined indoor air pollution concentrations and fuel use in 187 households in a village in Karnataka, India. About half the households received “clean” stoves, and half–the control group–did not.

The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, is paywall protected. The online journal Phys.Org accurately summarizes the results: “Actual indoor concentrations measured in the field were only moderately lower for the new stoves than for traditional stoves.”

Part of the reason was that “40 percent of families who used a more efficient wood stove as part of the intervention also elected to continue using traditional stoves, which they preferred for making staple dishes such as roti bread. That duplication erased many of the hoped-for efficiency and pollution improvements.” Those households “stacked” new and old stoves instead of replacing the old with the new. See the image at the top right corner of the page.

The climate benefit of the CDM-financed “intervention” was also nil. As Phys.Org reports:

Laboratory studies suggested that the more efficient, cleaner-burning stoves could reduce a family’s fuelwood consumption by up to 67 percent, thereby reducing household air pollution and deforestation. In practice, there was no statistically significant difference in fuel consumption between families who used the new stoves and families who continued to cook over open fires or traditional stoves.

NEPA is the landmark 1969 statute requiring federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of “any major project—federal, state, or local—that involves federal funding, work performed by the federal government, or permits issued by a federal agency.”

This being the Age of Global Warming, when all things are to be measured by their carbon footprints and all policies judged by their conformity to the climate agenda, the Obama administration’s push to elevate climate concerns in NEPA reviews was a foregone conclusion.

CEQ’s fact sheet claims the final guidance “provides a level of predictability and certainty by outlining how Federal agencies can describe these impacts by quantifying greenhouse gas emissions when conducting NEPA reviews.” On the contrary, the NEPA process already empowers NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) and anti-energy activists to delay and block development projects with immense economic benefits and immeasurably small, hypothetical climate effects. The guidance will increase the role of climate politics, with all their irrationality and rancor, in NEPA reviews. [click to continue…]

The Democratic Party officially adopted their 2016 platform at their national convention in Philadelphia on July 25th. The energy and environment section is titled “Combat Climate Change, Build a Clean Energy Economy, and Secure Environmental Justice.” It begins with this statement: “Climate change is an urgent threat and the defining challenge of our time.”

The challenge doesn’t actually seem to be much of a challenge, because the platform claims that tackling it by producing “50 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources within a decade, with half a billion solar panels installed within four years and enough renewable energy to power every home in the country” will create “millions of good-paying middle class jobs” and “save families and businesses money on their energy bills.”

“Democrats believe that carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities, and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and help meet our climate goals.” However, putting a price on emissions does not mean a carbon tax, which is not mentioned, although the platform does say that they “support using every tool available to reduce emissions now.” These steps include the so-called Clean Power Plan, fuel efficiency standards for automobiles and heavy-duty trucks, and higher energy efficiency standards in building codes and appliances.

As for environmental justice, Democrats “will work to expand access to cost-saving renewable energy by low-income households, create good-paying jobs in communities that have struggled with energy poverty, and oppose efforts by utilities to limit consumer choice or slow clean energy deployment.”

Although renewable energy apparently saves us money, “Democrats believe the tax code must reflect our commitment to a clean energy future by eliminating special tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies as well as defending and extending tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.”

Democrats vow to prohibit oil production in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast and to “phase down extraction of fossil fuels from our public lands,” while working “to expand the amount of renewable energy production on federal lands and waters.”

The platform pointedly mentions twice that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax.” Trump has also promised to stop funding the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Treaty. Democrats, on the other hand, “are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.” Mobilization will begin in the first 100 days of the next administration when “the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.”

In addition to supporting corporate disclosure of climate risk, “Democrats also respectfully request the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of corporate fraud on the part of fossil fuel companies accused of misleading shareholders and the public on the scientific reality of climate change.”

Compare and contrast this line in a speech at the Democratic National Convention last night:

“Democrats don’t alienate, isolate, exclude or demonize; and we don’t manufacture fear.” —California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, 25th July 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKhNWIPmfcM

With a few quotes from the “Web of Denial” speeches by Senate Democrats on the Senate floor two weeks ago:

“Welcome to the web of denial. Thank you to those who are working to expose it. It is a filthy thing in our democracy.” —Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), in a speech on the Senate floor, 11th July 2016, Congressional Record, page S4952

“These front groups are paid to spin a web of denial wrapped in ideology with the aim of purposely deceiving the public about the dangers of climate change.” —Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), in a speech on the Senate floor, 12th July 2016, Congressional Record, page S4987

“So it seems that while CEI has changed its client, it is still in the exact same business of selling lies and selling out the health and the future of ordinary Americans.” —Senator Jeanne Shaheen, 12th July, Congressional Record, page S4989

“But this past May, William Happer was a signatory on a misleading, full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad, placed by another thread in the web of deceit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, attacked the reasonable efforts of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and a coalition of other attorneys general united for clean power who are investigating more than 100 businesses, nonprofits, and private individuals to see if they misled the public about climate change.” —Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.), in speech on the Senate Floor, 12th July 2016, Congressional Record, page S5012